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I nodded. But I was holding onto his shirt, which may have given him the wrong impression. So I let go. And stepped back to grab my whiteboard.Fine. Now, hurry or you’ll miss dinner with all the singles.
“That should be fun. Actually, I am going to grab a sandwich in the kitchen then take over one of the bathtubs in the dorm while they’re all eating dinner. Then I’m going to bed early and sleeping through the night with no pesky mate rubbing up against me.”
Oh, is that a bad thing?I tried to sound stricken, but I wasn’t fooling either of us.
“It’s the best thing.” His smile spread wide. “But for tonight, I’ll have to settle for sleep. I’ll be back after breakfast.” After another sweet, lingering kiss, he was gone, and the sun was setting.
I’d bathed that afternoon at the waterfall, so I just sat down and thought about what it was like not to have a complicated life. To not have to worry about what others felt and thought…and what they needed. To skip breakfast because I figured I’d eat some berries while out gathering in the forest. To go to bed at sunset because…because I was bored.
Bored.
I hadn’t been bored since the day Dean walked into my life, and certainly not since Shane and now Creek joined us. Joined me. A part of my mind was always on Dean and where he was, what he was doing… If I ached for him even with my other mates present, what must it be like for him all alone?
Before my mates, I’d been not bored precisely but certainly not engaged. A book Shane had brought me sat next to my chair. It identified plants and trees in this region. I’d learned so much from Magda, but I wanted to know more, and this heavy, thick hardback volume not only listed the plants by their Latin names but also an extensive list of their uses, medicinal, culinary, and even household. Like which could be used to create natural cleaning products or dye fabric. Some I knew, others I learned from the book, and I’d even started writing out things I used these magical plants for that the author, a professor with a PhD and a bunch of other letters after his name, had not mentioned. A vague idea of writing a book of my own, something more folksy and less scholarly, had been brewing in the back of my mind for a while. I picked up the legal pad I’d been making notes on and a pen and added some more. Not that I’d be a published author or anything, but maybe I could make a pamphlet for the pack and my friends like Christi and Wendy. It would be a great Yule gift.
“Jillian?” Creek’s voice was deeper than the other two, and I believed it was because of his broad chest and arms I’d already come to love sheltering in. “Can I come in?”
The pad slid off my lap as I rose, heart hammering so hard, I feared it would burst from my chest. I grabbed my whiteboard.Of course, you live here.If I had been able to speak, my voice would have trembled as hard as my hands, I was sure. And my writing reflected the same nerves.
“I brought dinner from the compound. In case we didn’t want to take time to cook.”
I wiped the board and wrote again.Great. Thank you.Why we might not be taking time to cook rang loudly enough without my mentioning it.Are you hungry?
He was six feet or so away from me, but his eyes blazed in a way his carefully calm voice also could not disguise. “Not for food.”
The question lay unspoken. The decision was mine, but I’d made it already. He was my mate, and he’d been so patient. Setting the whiteboard on the table by my chair, I took in a deep breath. Lovemaking with my other mates had been natural and beautiful despite the nerves I’d experienced beforehand. My wolf was content, confident in this mating. I would be, too.
Turning to face Creek, the tallest and largest of my mates, I held out my arms.
He crossed the room in two steps and enfolded me in his embrace. I tipped my face up for his kiss but instead he simply gazed at me for a long moment, his hunger for something other than food at bay while he showed me the emotion that underlay it. His love warmed me to my toes before he scooped me up and carried me to the bed then let me slide to stand next to it. “You’re so beautiful,” he said, awe in his voice. “The goddess has blessed me in this mating.” Then he kissed me, and while his lips and tongue provided a distraction, his hands were busy divesting me of my dress and panties, the only things I wore.
I reached for his shirt, but he stopped me, and broke our kiss, his breathing harsh in the quiet cabin. “Let me. I can’t wait another moment to be skin to skin with you, my mate. I can’t.”
I let my arms drop to my sides and sat on the side of the bed. If I wasn’t doing the undressing, I wanted to watch it happen. Not that I hadn’t seen Creek naked before. We’d shifted together and run as wolves. Both with and without Shane. But this time was different, and I wanted to take time to appreciate the masculine beauty he revealed.
More muscular than the others, even Dean after all the wood cutting, Creek was built for strength and action. I’d watched him practice fighting with some of the others, and he always won. He could protect me from anything, and would. I didn’t need him to say so. I knew. And my wolf knew and preened at this male who was binding himself to us. She was well pleased. When he’d finished and stood naked before me, he stole my breath, but only for a moment before he was sitting on the bed and drawing me onto his lap.
We were kissing again, but this time his cock nudged at the place between my thighs, and his kisses left my lips and trailed to my ear where he whispered things so sexy and so naughty, I could hardly believe they came from this man who had never said anything like that before. He’d been so polite and reserved.
He had unseen depths, and while he caressed me, learning my body with his hands, pausing to pinch my nipples between thumb and forefinger, cupping my breasts and lifting them to his waiting mouth, my blood heated. He sucked and licked and nibbled at my tender nubs before laying me on the mattress and trailing his lips down my abdomen.
His fingers arrived at my pussy first, parting the labia in preparation for his heated mouth. I writhed under his touch, rising higher by the second, wanting to demand he hurry, stop toying with me and holding me from reaching the pinnacle. He slid two fingers inside me and pumped them a few times, and I rocked my hips upward. But when he gathered moisture on two fingers and brought it back to circle my never-breached back hole then plunged them inside to the first knuckle, nothing could have stopped me from coming harder than I’d ever come before.
I returned from the darkness to his low chuckle. “I think we’ll explore that another time, mate. Would you like that?”
Like it? I hadn’t even known it was a thing to do. But I wasn’t about to go get my whiteboard to comment.
Rising to his knees, he lifted my legs to his hips and positioned his cock at my entrance. I was still tremoring from the first orgasm when he drove deep and sent me into another. And another. He fucked me with speed and strength, with his own rhythm unlike any other. Not better, just magnificent. And I clung to him like a ship in a tossing sea while pleasure poured over, in, and around me.
I was in the middle of an orgasm when he groaned and poured his seed into me, bending to sink his teeth into the flesh by my collarbone and marking me. I was so far gone, my mark missed his carotid by a fraction of an inch. But I didn’t know that then. I only knew we were joined and would never be torn asunder.
Chapter Twelve
Dean
The morning sun was just peeking through the trees while I took inventory of what our pack had provided me with in my absence. Piles of wood in all the correct widths and lengths were stacked methodically under the open-walled sheds that would keep them relatively dry if it rained while the rolled-up blueprints hung heavy in my hand.
There were still a few boards to be cut, and it looked like someone had left the job in a hurry. I had work to do, and yet I stood there like a tit on a boar hog. Useless. Just dead weight.
